Archive for category Learning Strategy

On Wednesday 14 March 2018 PSK Events hosted a Fishbowl Discussion in Sydney on the topic of ‘Leading a Learning Organisation.’ While I couldn’t attend I joined the #PSKevents backchannel on Twitter and participated in an active discussion on topics such as:

I’m the guest on an upcoming episode of The Good Practice podcast on the topic of Learning Culture. The discussion is being recorded tonight. I’ve long been a fan of this podcast, so am delighted to be invited to be a guest. I’m conscious that the episodes are around 20-30 minutes and include a ‘what I’ve learned this week’ segment. This means that the discussion is relatively short, so I wanted to get my thoughts together in order to ensure that I can contribute concise, clear points that people will hopefully find thought-provoking and valuable.

Step 1 – Figure out what I already thought and knew

I started preparation about a week ago. My first step was to figure out what I already knew and thought about the topic. To do this I simply started writing short declarative statements and jotting down examples in longhand. Before long I had three pages of notes.

I proceeded to organise my thoughts using a mind map, which quickly gave me:

a potential structure for the discussion (What, Why, Who, How) – turns out the guys at Good Practice liked this structure and we’ll use it as a start point in our discussion

a list of examples and stories I could use

a list of sources for further reading to round out and update my thinking

I transcribed and organised my notes into the new discussion structure in Evernote and shared this with the podcast organiser.

Step 2 – Additional Reading

The sources I found most helpful were:

10 Principles of Organisational Culture, a post by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel and James Thomas – this post helped me refine and simplify my definition of what culture is. I also found the idea that behaviour leads mindset resonated with my experience and helps to explain why values based ‘campaigns’ that don’t align with the way things get done tend to create cynicism rather than change.

The Transformation Curve, Towards Maturity’s 2018 global learning benchmark report. This report marks a shift in Towards Maturity’s ongoing research of what top performing Learning and Development teams do differently to provide a four stage maturity model as organisations move from optimising training to shared responsibility for learning. Their analysis helps identify the characteristics of a culture that promotes learning.

I created a new document and made a dot point summary of the key talking points, stories and recommended sources for further reading in each section of the discussion . I won’t share that here so I don’t spoil the podcast episode. Also, I’ve been warned that the podcast discussion could be quite tangential. It will be interesting to compare the final product to my talking points.

Bonus Step – Blog Post Outline

Regardless of what happens in the discussion, my preparation has helped me to clarify my thinking on learning culture and supplement it with current research. I’ve prepared an outline of a blog post intended to inform and influence business leaders to step up in their role of building an organisation culture that promotes learning.

I’m not sure when the podcast episode will go to air – I shall be sure to write and tweet an update on this when it is live.

I attended a vibrant webinar today where Laura Overton presented a high level overview of the first Towards Maturity regional benchmark study of Learning and Development (L&D) in Australasia. The webinar was hosted by the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD). I’ve compiled the tweets from the webinar (via Storify) if you want to get a flavour for key points. Keep an eye out for the webinar recording to be posted by AITD. Even better – download the report from the Towards Maturity site.

Early in the webinar Laura made the statement “Use data to start conversations.” I’m not sure if she was trying to encourage the webinar participants to get active in the chat box – I don’t think she needed to as the group were already exchanging views, and the conversation picked up even more as the webinar progressed. In the coming week as I read and think about the data in the report I’ll post about the findings and invite others to join in discussion about the data. I expect that LinkedIn will be a good place to do this.

Today I’m thinking more about the use of data to start conversations and some of the ways I’ve seen this done recently. Those who follow my Working Out Loud page and Twitter account will know that I have used the Towards Maturity benchmarking process and tool in my work at both Coca-Cola Amatil and Qantas. I have also encouraged other L&D practitioners to complete the benchmarking in order to reflect on their goals, strategy, results and practices and inform action. Of course, to turn data into action requires conversation in order to gain insight from the data. One of the interesting conversations we had at Qantas as a result of benchmarking was to compare maturity of tactics used by different L&D teams and ask ‘what are the teams doing differently from each other, why, and how could we improve our practices’ (i.e. what can we learn from each other). If you’re curious you can read more about what Qantas learned from benchmarking.

We also used the Learning Landscape Audit at Qantas – a ‘learner voice’ survey that provided insights into things like what and how people were learning, how they wanted to learn, use of technology in work and learning. One piece of data that has started many conversations was that over 65% of the 1,400 Qantas employees who completed the survey use their own devices to access resources for work and learning. This greatly exceeded expectations, particularly for workforce segments such as baggage handlers. It opened up conversations exploring what this means for the delivery of performance support and learning solutions.

Of course, if you have an LMS you have lots of data you could probe into and look at from different angles. For instance, what’s the average attendance at your face to face learning sessions? What if you were to find that you had courses being delivered face to face where the average class size was less than two people (yes, this is a real example). This sparked some discussions about why this is the case and what could be done differently.

Two weeks ago, during the conduct of a learning technologies review for a client, I familiarised myself with xAPI. The real value in using xAPI is the opportunity to transform data about work and learning into a common language and analyse it to gain a wide range of insights including what top performing people in a role do differently in both their work and learning, and what learning interventions actually make a different to workplace performance. I have become very excited about xAPI and they potential insights we can gain using it and the opportunity to embed more learning into the workflow. Imagine if you could gather evidence of compliant behaviours through analysis of people’s work instead of pushing lots of people through mandatory recurrent training and assessment to demonstrate compliance. Of course, a lot of conversations would be required with stakeholders around the data in order to get to this point. So, I’ve digressed a little here -> this is my ‘half-baked’ Working Out Loud space after all.

If I’ve aroused your curiosity about xAPI, here are a couple of introductory resources that I found helpful:

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I recently finished working at Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA). Those of you who have follow me on social media or read my blog know that I really enjoyed my job. So you may be wondering why I have decided to return to working independently.

The Job I Enjoyed

In November 2011 I started a 6-week contract with CCA to design a national approach to capability development in Supply Chain. One thing led to another and I joined CCA in early 2012 as an employee to lead the Supply Chain Technical Academy. At the time a completely decentralised model was in place for technical capability development with an independent, inconsistent approach in different locations. CCA had invested heavily in a range of equipment and platforms, and wanted to ensure that their capability to use these was sustained and improved. The introduced a robust national approach to developing core technical capabilities via blended learning utilising the 70:20:10 framework.

Australian Institute of Training and Development Awards to CCA Supply Chain

In early 2014 the Supply Chain business strategy changed. We updated our capability strategy to maintain alignment and strengthen governance. We also explicitly added continuous workplace learning to our strategy, which we defined as ongoing learning outside of structured programs. To execute this strategy we set about modernising our Learning & Development approach and capabilities.

Finalist – 2015 AITD L&D Professional of the Year

My time at CCA was a period of significant professional growth – due both to my work experience and self-directed learning. In 2014 I transformed my professional development, as described in, and symbolised by, this blog. I have developed a strong global Personal Learning Network (PLN), adopted Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) and Working Out Loud (WOL) practices. This enabled me to step-up my strategic leadership and implement modern approaches to workplace learning. One business challenge I became particularly interested in is improving the use of knowledge and expertise to improve business performance.

At CCA I had the opportunity to be innovate. I felt I could make a positive difference to the daily work experience of people across the organisation. My role was a vehicle to impact individual, team and organisational performance. I worked with people I liked who were professional, reliable, and cared about what they did. For the most part I did work I enjoyed that gave me a sense of meaning and contribution. However, over time my strengths and interests shifted – and I wasn’t able to find a way to focus on those within CCA.

Why I am now Working Independently

Having realised that it was time to move on, I could have looked for another corporate role. Instead I have chosen to return to working independently. Here are the reasons for this choice.

1) To focus on work that plays to my strengths and interests – I want to pursue projects that focus on the things I am really good at and that bring me the most satisfaction. In a corporate job I would be in a weaker position to say ‘no’ to elements of the role that don’t meet this criteria. Working for myself increases my position to choose what I work on.

2) To have greater impact. Working independently extends my reach. My personal vision statement includes the aspiration: “I make a positive difference and leave people, places and organisations in a better state than I found them.” Working with more people and organisations increases my opportunity to make an impact.

3) To learn even more. When I last worked independently I found that working with a range of organisations accelerated my learning. I get to see what is working well and what could be improved in every project or task I work on. My capacity to create value constantly increases through exposure to a variety of organisations.

4) To be valued more – As my external profile increased through networking, writing, and speaking, people from other organisations sought me out. They wanted to know more about what I did and how I did it, or to use me as a sounding board for their work challenges and opportunities. This tells me that I have knowledge and experience that I can contribute to others in a range of organisations. As an employee people inside your organisation often value your contributions less because you are one of them and not an external expert.

As an aside, why do people leave it until someone’s farewell to say ‘thank you’ for your contribution and tell you what they appreciated about your work? Tell a colleague today what you value about their work and thank them.

5) To improve my productivity – I don’t need to spell this one out in detail – less corporate administration, less organisational politics, fewer distractions and interruptions, less commuting. I’m very good at organising myself and find it easy to focus when working independently.

6) To improve my lifestyle – I want greater flexibility to work when I want in the way I want. Working independently increases my capacity to create balance across the many roles in my life. Another consideration is that while I am still energetic and passionate about my work, I am closer to semi-retirement than high school graduation. I am in a better position to create ongoing income sources working for myself than for an organisation.

What I Will Miss Most

The thing I will miss most is the daily camaraderie and energy of my Academy colleagues. They are professional, reliable, willing to take a risk and try new things, and have a growth mindset. They supported, encouraged, challenged, guided, inspired and motivated me.

What About You?

What is your current work situation? Do you work for yourself, or are you considering this option? Why? Leave a comment to share your experience and thoughts on working independently versus being an employee.

I attended the Association for Talent Development International Conference and Exposition (ATDICE) in Denver 23– 25 May 2016. On the day after the conference I made a short video to share key insights I gained from some of the sessions I attended. Video is below, followed by (slightly polished-up) transcript.

Personal Leadership

My first insights I relate to aspects of personal leadership. I attended a session called Leading with Impact and Influence by Amy Franko from Impact Instruction. Amy spoke about leading from the inside out, and not being knocked about by external circumstances, or letting them dictate how you show up. She spoke about creating your own leadership path to create a ripple effect on others in order to have impact, influence, and provide inspiration. She shared research from the Centre for Creative Leadership that identified key future leadership skills:

Thought Leadership

Another session I’ve got a lot out of for myself was on Stepping Into Thought leadership. The session was presented by two very dynamic people – Alexia Vernon and Halelly Azulay. Before they went into different thought leadership they talked about what thought leadership is. They suggested that you don’t need to carve out a completely original area of thinking or an original idea; rather it’s about bringing your original voice and perspective to the topic to articulate what you want to say about it. They provided questions to help you uncover your focus area of thought leadership. They also stressed the role of building strong networks to help build thought leadership.

Then they went through a stack of different though leadership activities in the areas of:

Brave Leadership

Sticking with the theme of leadership, there is no way I couldn’t mention the amazing keynote by Brene Brown. Many people will have seen her TEDTalk on vulnerability. She was a fabulous speaker, very authentic, and spoke to her topic really well. It’s a topic that can be quite raw and I had a feeling she was reaching out directly to my heart and talking about topics relevant to my personal life around thing such as vulnerability and trust, and also that she was speaking to my head in organisational context around bringing trust into the workplace. She suggested that leaders have to make a choice as between comfort and courage. It takes courage to do the essential work of being a leader – which is to go to places that others may not want to go to, places around emotion and behaviour. She spoke about the four pillars of courage:

Vulnerability

clarity of values

trust

rising skills, which is about how to get back up after a fall.

She really made me want to embrace life, to live a bigger life and to be the very best leader that I possibly can. I’m definitely a Brene Brown fan girl now.

Science of Learning

Paul Zak , Chief Research Officer at Olfactor, talked about trust as the basis for effective culture. He shared interesting research which uses oxytocin as a signalling mechanism for trust.

Sebastian Bailey is a psychologist with a PhD in learning transfer. He’s used his research to develop a model for supporting learning with bite-size methodology. He has founded Mind Gym.

Patti Shank PhD and is president of Learning Peak challenged the use of the term ‘neuro-‘ anything. When someone claims that a product or approach is backed by neuroscience she suggested that you need to be wary as we haven’t learnt much about learning from neuroscience. However we have learned a lot from cognitive science and we should be paying bit more attention to that and applying it.

Will Thalheimer is a PhD, consultant and research translator. He spoke about ways of improving smile sheets, which I’m sure anyone working in an organisational training context could benefit from looking at.

Benchmarking

The next area I was really interested in here was benchmarking and Data. I had a great conversation with Laura Overton of Towards Maturity who specialise in benchmarking and research on organisational learning. We discussed their benchmarking tool which is open at the moment. I strongly encourage workplace learning practitioners to complete the benchmark. I’ve recently done that and it’s giving me some good data to look at where my organisation sits compared to the benchmark in a range of elements of learning strategy and practices, and helped me to start identifying areas for improvement. Here’s a link to the benchmark .

Laura also presented with Peter Casebow from Good Practice about improving how managers learn using an evidence-based approach. The Towards Maturity data shows that only 30% of learning professionals understand how their people learn. Good Practice has done research with 500 managers on how they deal with unfamiliar challenges. It turns out that access trumps the perceived effectiveness of method for finding answers and solutions. People will use the easiest way to access information, even if they know they may not be using the best quality information. Lack of access and lack of relevance of content were highlighted as barriers to people using their intranet to help solve problems.

Practical Uses of Social Media for Formal Learning

The final session I wanted to mention here is from the super-energetic Dan Steer who had us cheering along at the right times. It was on practical uses of social media in formal training. His objective was to ensure that everybody left with something practical that they could put into action immediately to improve the formal training – and he delivered. He provided some basic principles around only doing in the room what need to do, and thinking about using social media tools to do other things that don’t need to be done in the room. He also suggested you need to think about the type of activity you are doing, the objectives of the activity and identify the best motivating and most useful tool.

One tool I learned about that session which I will definitely be looking to use is Ginkgo, which is a collaborative note-taking tool. What is awesome is that you can download the collaborative notes into a MS Word format and make that available as a readily accessible recap afterwards.

The other thing I wanted to do is to thank ATD. 10,000 people, huge conference venue, amazing organisation. ATD did a great job at every single aspect of the organisation, and as a speaker I really appreciated the opportunity to be here and share a case study. I don’t know that I’ll be back every year it is a long trip from Australia but I’m certainly planning on being back in two years . I will be blogging and sharing more of my notes from sessions over the next couple of weeks so lookout on my blog for more insights